Google has announced that its Chrome browser will no longer include support for H.264, the patent-encumbered video codec favored by Apple and Microsoft. Future versions of Chrome will only include support for the open source and royalty-free WebM and Ogg Theora codecs.

ReviewWhat do you want from a smartphone? Good looks? New, new features? Decent battery life? The latest operating system? If so, the Nexus S should be right up your alley. The latest Android handset comes direct from Google but where its predecessor, the Nexus One, was made by HTC, this one is created for Google by Samsung.

The job of a datacentre network is to connect the equipment inside to the outside world, and to connect the internal systems to each other. It needs to be secure, high performance and operate with an eye on energy consumption, with a guiding principle of minimising device numbers and costs, so you end up with a system that can do what's needed while remaining as simple as possible.

Part ThreeLeading British technologist Charles Davies was Psion’s first employee – and as a director for two decades he was instrumental in the success of the British computer company. The plasma physics PhD was Symbian’s CTO for five years and left Nokia earlier this year. He rarely gives interviews but kindly agreed to talk about Symbian for our series of historical pieces on the creation of the venture and the early years of the smartphone business.

Powerline networking, which uses ubiquitous home electrical wiring as a pipeline for data, has had a hard time winning popular support. Wireless networking has grabbed most of the public's mindshare, largely thanks to the Intel marketing machine. And the mains wiring technology has struggled with the industry's inability to rally behind a single standard during its evolution through 14Mb/s, 85Mb/s and 200Mb/s incarnations.

AnalysisThe death-tech beat has spoken of little else but China's new "stealth fighter" for some weeks now – and yesterday, funnily enough just as the US Defense Secretary was visiting Beijing, the J-20 (or whatever it may turn out to be officially called) finally took to the air.

Rackspace Hosting – which is trying to position itself as the alternative to Amazon when it comes to cloud computing and which is one of the big suppliers of traditional hosted servers – has partnered with Akamai Technologies to help speed up application performance on its clouds.

The US military says it is on track to revolutionise the world of chip manufacturing by making it possible to produce advanced sub-65-nanometer ICs in small numbers - at the same low unit costs delivered by today's billion-dollar, mass production chip factories.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says he has a trove of private documents on Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp empire and is prepared to release them in the event the whistle-blower website is taken down.

A former data analyst for the Transportation Security Administration was sentenced to two years in prison for planting code in a terrorist screening database server after he was told his position was going to be eliminated.

When radio was the new, disruptive technology, broadcasters in Australia had a great idea: sell radios that were tied to one station. That way, the sale of the devices would fund the operation of the station.

The proposed Pacific Fibre, which if built would add both capacity and competition to the trans-Pacific fibre route, has announced $NZ5.5 million of funding from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel via his Valar Ventures investment vehicle.

AnalysisThings seemed poised to turn around for AMD in 2011. But the abrupt departure of CEO Dirk Meyer on Monday afternoon – at the exact same time that rivals Intel and Nvidia ceased their hostilities and a week after Nvidia jumped into the processor racket – indicates that AMD's board of directors sees challenges that aren't obvious to outsiders.